Endlessa: how many TH/s do you think we need to go solo?
I'll do the math tomorrow and figure it out, but I wrote a mining simulator back in march/april (to see how personal hash would perform under different scenarios) and it seemed optimal to be able to solve 2/3 blocks per cycle. You have not take in account hash growth and acceleration (rate of block solves past current difficulty, when difficulty changes it's almost instantly lower than network hash would dictate realtime, so it skews the "theoretical" maths). so as a safety margin, my tests said about 3 would help mitigate non-solve periods due to lucky/unlucky and competition (unexpected large deployments mid cycle). so you don't end up chasing the proverbial difficulty tail, so to speak.
those were just my tests . . . feel free to verify
edit: a cycle being a difficulty change
Sounds cool... let me take a stab in the dark at something rough using your suggested 3 blocks.
I would suggest always plugging in a predicted difficulty based on current est next difficulty * 1.3 to accommodate the additional hashpower added through the cycle. This way there is some headroom by using the END OF CYCLE estimated hashrate.
I took the next estimated adjustment and multiplied it to get 10660000 GH/s as the possible end result of the next adjustment, which will be my target hashrate for the following calculations.
To gain a minimum of 3 blocks by the end of the next adjustment would be (desired blocks/blocks per adjustment) * hashrate = needed average solo hashrate or...
(3/2016) * 10660000 = 15863.09523809524 GH/s to obtain an average of 75 BTCs by the end of the next cycle.
So... by Endlessa's evaluation and some rough calculations... Lab_Rat is ahead of the game sitting at 23 TH/s and is outpacing a possible recommended minimum to solo mine hashrate if you are seeking only 3 blocks.
Food for thought. Curious if maybe the mine shouldn't just use GHash.io instead of where ever we are now... luck is good... hashrate is more than 2.25 PH/s and NMC/DVC/IXC are all included and ZERO POOL FEE! Only a 0.005 withdrawal fee. And since they allow you to buy cloud hashes with NMC... no reason not to have all NMC earned to be put straight into cloud mining to boost the total earnings. Why not?
Thoughts?